Sky, It's GW Micro, that "is!" helpful! I admit, I've never delt with FS but I've heard from so many different sources, that's the big reason why I didn't want JAWS in the first place, because of the company.
Sandra Fouts Phone Counselor Arkansas Attorney General's Office 323 Center Street, Ste 200 Little Rock, AR 501-371-2303 Fax 501-682-8118 -----Original Message----- From: Sky Taylor [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 3:37 PM To: Stephen Clower Cc: [email protected] Subject: Re: we vs jfw Hmmm. I think I consider myself lucky. I actually did have one tech support regarding the upgrade with GW Micro for we 7.0 and the guy was helpful. ----- Original Message ----- From: Stephen Clower <mailto:[email protected]> To: gw-info-gwmicro.com <mailto:[email protected]> Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 1:31 PM Subject: Re: we vs jfw Sky, That's great, but most of us who have switched to GW Micro's product line have received less than helpful and/or discourteous service from Freedom Scientific. Typically, if one feels compelled to call tech support, then the matter at hand is likely of some immediate urgency. Waiting to call back another day is rarely a feasible option. All I will say regarding GW's tech support is that the experience speaks for itself. You will always get a human being who will do his or her best to solve what problems you are having. That level of continuous tech support, to my knowledge, only exists with one or two other assistive tech providers throughout the industry. Sadly, rude, slow, or nonexistent customer support is turning out to be the rule; GW Micro is thankfully the exception. Regards, Steve On 7/1/2009 3:22 PM, Sky Taylor wrote: Well, Chip, I am able to get the support from Freedom Scientific, as they seem to like me as a friend, so they give me the support. I have had tuns of support from them. For example, when I bought a vista computer, I was able to get Jaws running on it fine. One of the things I would try doing before trying anything else, is that I would try again at another day to get the support. For example, I am having a problem with my PacMate where my wireless card isn't working on it, so we need to phone Freedom Scientific support to get the problem solved to get it working. ----- Original Message ----- From: Chip Orange <mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 10:34 AM Subject: RE: we vs jfw Hi Dennis, I switched from jaws, after about 10 years, to WE, about a year ago. It's fine if you really want to contact me privately to discuss this, but I'd suggest a public discussion is much better. others could correct or disagree with any points I would make, and they could add to anything I may have forgotten. I think you'll get better info this way, and if there are those who wish to say anything negative, and they don't wish to say it on list, they can still contact you privately. I switched because I found the FS customer service to be completely unresponsive; and this was a condition which continued over many instances spanning many years. I also switched when I first read of the GW plans for scripting. I could see immediately what a *huge* benefit such a scripting system would be towards allowing many more programs to become accessible. Not only is the GW scripting tool a fantastic tool for making an application accessible, it's also a tool (if you'll forgive the pun) which is accessible to the masses. so, if you and a few others are using a program that's not used by millions, and it has some accessibility problems, it's very likely one of you could write and publish a script to correct these problems. no more begging the screen reader vendor to fix this program in the next release, and being told by them that it's just not used by enough of their customers to be worth the time of the vendor. it's now in the hands of the users themselves. this is tremendously empowering! Yes, you could say jaws has the same scripting capability; but, I tried for years to work with jaws scripts, and found the entire process excruciatingly difficult, and poorly documented and/or supported. And to prove my point, there has been an explosion of WE scripts since the capability became available; I'd say more than all jaws scripts ever published. How has my own experience been as a WE user verses being a jaws user? Well, I have a paid up copy of jaws with 2 SMAs, and I haven't used it in about a year. that's the telling point I think. I find the support to be much more responsive. are they always right? if WE always the better screen reader for a given program? well, no on both points. But, GW cares about being right (helping you solve your problem), and they care about making their product better. I think they'd like to make some money along the way too. In my opinion FS cares about making money; if they make their product better along the way, how nice for you! but it's not their motivation. You can see the difference in the last (largely bug-fix) release of WE, which was free, while pretty much every release of jaws has been a paid upgrade, no matter how little new functionality was introduced. I'm sure you could get down to the level of arguing which reader was the better reader application by application; but seldom is this what decides anyone. most of us have to use a wide range of applications, so that kind of comparison is rarely helpful I think. Finally, for those who aren't lucky enough to have someone purchase your reader for you, GW offers a choice of purchasing plans involving a series of small payments. Last time I checked, FS had nothing like it; you simply had to come up with all the money up front. if you aren't sure about switching to WE, then why not rent it for a month? shouldn't cost you too much to try it that way. ok, I guess I've hit the high points for me as to why I switched; let me know if you have any questions. hth, Chip ------------------------------ Chip Orange Database Administrator Florida Public Service Commission [email protected] (850) 413-6314 (Any opinions expressed are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Florida Public Service Commission.) ________________________________ From: dennis [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Wednesday, July 01, 2009 10:48 AM To: [email protected] Subject: we vs jfw could people who used both contac me? strongly thinkin of going to we want to know advantages and dis advantages of both If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message. If you reply to this message it will be delivered to the original sender only. If your reply would benefit others on the list and your message is related to GW Micro, then please consider sending your message to [email protected] so the entire list will receive it. All GW-Info messages are archived at http://www.gwmicro.com/gwinfo, and can be searched through and sorted using the search form at the bottom of the page. If you wish to unsubscribe from this list, send a message to [email protected] and include leave gw-info in the body of the message.
